Chapter VII (2)

There came a time, after the High Court had dismissed his appeal, when he felt quite light and cheery in the confident anticipation of the Home Secretary’s intervention. He thought of the Home Secretary as a man with a soft grey moustache and kind eyes. But just as he had feared the suave punctilio of the trial, he began to fear the sensitive, kindhearted men, who, wincing in their sensibilities, would turn aside and leave it to the other men to deal with the raw places. He read of the Home Secretary going off for his customary week-end; he learnt of his solicitor travelling to him with a batch of signatures, and coming back, ambiguous in the extreme, only saying that the Home Secretary’s decision would be duly published after his return to London from his week-end holiday. Then he saw it in the morning papers. The Home Secretary could see no ground for advising his Majesty to intervene with the normal course of the sentence, and the papers further stated that the sheriff had arranged for the execution to take place on the 22nd of this month, and that on the morning of the 21st Hanbury, the executioner, would travel to Liverpool to put up the gallows.

And then he asked--it was a desperate afterthought--that they should let him finish his new novel. It was all but ready; he only asked two weeks’ respite. Secretly he hoped that it might be found so good that all the writers and critics in the world and the Great British (Reading) Public would see to it that he was granted life. It was an application truly without precedent. But there was nothing lost by trying. There was still time, and his solicitor got busy. The petition was drawn up and had appended to it a long list of signatures from all the leading lights in letters, music, art and science, some from the dramatic stage, and not a few illustrious foreigners from France and Italy, even one from Poland and Czecho-Slovakia. A German writer’s name was intentionally omitted from the list, as it was feared that a certain daily paper would be sure to cry out that opinion in this country was being dictated from Berlin, and that the convalescent mind of our post-war public might echo the cry, and the Government would find it difficult to grant the application.

However, the respite was granted. It was his first success after a long series of reverses. He had another two weeks clear to finish his book in. Some newspapers, of the howling kind, duly howled against it. “What Can Murders Teach Us?” was the headline of a certain Sunday paper. “Why, to murder,” he could almost hear the responding voice of certain readers. “Writers are worse than some other folk,” he could just hear them saying it in Pedlar-with-Thresham. “Aye, they are a bad lot.” And Mrs. Weaver answering, “That’s right.”

He remembered how she had sat in court, saying in reply to a question put to her by counsel, “That’s right,” and never once looked up at him.

The book was got out with all haste. Three days before the execution it was published, and his publisher sent him the first batch of reviews. The stimulus given to it by his impending execution was tremendous. His publisher recognised it as an invaluable advertisement and rose to the occasion. For the first time in his life Mr. Proudfoot was a rich man, and he made generous provisions for his father, for the few years that he could yet be expected to survive. But the integrity of the British reviewer is proverbial. The mere fact of Proudfoot’s impending death could not influence their critical opinion of his work one way or another. One critic wrote: “This book, while quite pleasant and readable, is in no way remarkable.” And another critic, ignorant, it would seem, of the fate involved, pleaded: “Go back, get you back to your former style, and we shall listen to you till the crack of doom.” He _had_ gone back; he had deliberately gone back on the advice of that same critic, and in any case there was no looking forward now. But still another critic wrote: “One would wish the author had begun to break new ground, express life from a new angle....” The Great British Public was silent as the grave.

The last hope had gone, and the last full day of his remaining life was beginning to unfold itself. The warders, like old friends, played cards with him all day to take off his mind from the event. In the little intervals he wondered whether Hanbury who was to hang him on the morrow was not perchance the man who bit off the heads of live rats whom he and Weaver should have visited that fatal Sunday. Weaver had not disclosed his name. But there were few hangmen, he knew, and this might very well be the man in question. “Where does Hanbury, the hangman, come from?” he inquired from the warder.

“Up Manchester way.”

It _was_ the man!

What emotions, what a multitude of moods he experienced in those few brief hours. Till twelve he was sprightly and not very nervous. The hangman, peeping at him through the observation hole, to decide what “drop” to give him, saw him pacing up and down in the cell, puffing calmly at a cigarette. But as, at midnight, the prison clock boomed out the hours, he got agitated, threw away the cigarette and began counting the remaining hours on his fingers. He tried to think of the noble souls who went before him:--of Anton Chehov, who, after gravely saying to the doctor who had been called to him during the night, “I am dying,” drinking the glass of champagne prescribed to him to the bottom and remarking, with a smile, to his wife, “It’s a long while since I have had champagne,” turning over on one side, and presently being quiet for ever;--of Goethe asking that the window might be opened to admit of more air and more light, and the faithful Eckermann coming to look at him, lying dead. “And I turned aside,” he records, “to give a free run to my tears.” And with a shudder he recalled that _his_ body would fall into lime to be instantly consumed like a foul thing. He must go not knowing why he lived, and nobody in those bleak immensities would know or care: no father, no mother, no love in the world would intervene on his behalf; not even memory would be left him to recall his single spell of life, as if he never had been, as if indeed he was never meant to matter. There was but to “curse God and die.”

And suddenly his soul stirred within him, as if it had wings. “It’s the end here,” he thought. “But it’s not the end there.” Weaver believed in the world-soul--which meant that in a while he and Weaver would be one. It was night, but he could not sleep. Perhaps now, all over the world, there were people who could not sleep on his account and lay thinking of him. As by imponderable wireless waves he, alone in the dark cell with the gallows adjoining, felt himself linked to all compassionate souls; and to them he sent greetings--his desperate greetings.... At last he slept.

His sleep was troubled. He dreamt he had shrunk back from the pale gate of death, a bleak coldness in his chest and limbs, and was going past a park where there were children playing and people lounging wearily after their strenuous day’s work. And he thought that the trivialities of living were manna compared with death. But by the faces of the people who came out of the park he knew that they, not realising it, could not enjoy the gift of life. He walked on, and suddenly found himself in a beautiful, totally unfamiliar part of the town, the existence of which he had not even suspected. And he told himself how he would come home and tell his father of it. He woke--and there was nothing to tell but that he had dreamt it. And at once an incredible coldness invaded his heart.

Besides, it was cold in the cell. Our courage is at its lowest ebb in the early morning: it is wicked to hang people at dawn, he reflected. The warder came in. “Get up. Here is your suit.” His old suit that knew him in different circumstances. No collar to-day. “I’ll go and fetch you yer breakfast now.”

Perhaps at the last minute the Home Secretary might ...? He remembered seeing a film where also at the last moment, also the Home Secretary.... How cold. They wouldn’t tell his father. Or would they? The warder brought in a tray with some cocoa and porridge and an apple. He could not eat. He nibbled at the apple, and the savoury juice reminded him of some utopian land of fruit and flowers, like Italy, which he had never known. And he thought that when they had done their worst, and he was left in peace, perhaps in dreamland he would fly to such a land.

He looked strangely at the warder. “Is it very bad? Does it ... hurt?” he asked uneasily.

“No. A second--and it’s all over. Like having yer tooth out--no more. All over in a wink.”

The chaplain, a young man, was more confused than he--and more miserable. “Perhaps some spiritual consolation?” he stammered.

“I don’t understand,” said Mr. Proudfoot. “The indivisible universe speaks and lives only through each separate creature, as if no other creature existed at all. But it is the same indivisible universe which so expresses itself. And they--absurd--they want to do away with me--that means with the universe.”

“Perhaps a last communion....”

“Why?”

“Or a confession? After all, you’ve killed a human being.”

He thought of Weaver, and would have felt sorry for him if he did not feel so overwhelmingly sorry for himself. If they’d let him off now he’d put back what he had taken, put back into the spiritual cosmos what he’d taken from it. If they would leave it to him, he’d see that humanity did not lose.

He was brave, resigned. But a quarter of an hour before time, suddenly he felt he wanted to live, love, breathe in through these nostrils the fresh air of, not this, but other, future mornings, when _he_ would be no more.... He remembered a windy day when the big chestnuts swayed and lashed their branches like drunken things, and nuts and sticks fell off like missiles aimed at passers-by. A little boy had turned round to his mother, hiding his eyes from the dust and the wind in the folds of her skirt. This had moved him then somehow. And now an intolerable thought obsessed him that, when, in a few minutes from now, he would be buried in a pool of lime, he would feel the wind no more. And he thought that if this life he was leaving was the only life in a bleak universe, then he could not face the anguish of leaving it. But if there was another life, he wanted to hide his face in the lap of his Maker, hide from the missiles that fell all about him and hurt him, weep on His breast, and be quiet for ever....

But perhaps--two minutes yet--perhaps the Home Secretary ...? And before he could realise it the hangman stood in the cell. Was this it? Was it this? Was _this_, then, what he had to come to? Could mother but have known! But the warder, who up to this had been like a friend and confidant, suddenly began to shout at the executioner, “Come on, you there, get a move on and get about it quick!” (as though anxious to get the nasty job over). And Mr. Proudfoot felt almost as though his friend the warder had betrayed him to that other man. That other man had a soft, drooping, yellow moustache and glassy eyes, and seemed slow and good-natured. You wouldn’t think by the mild look of him that he bit off the heads of live rats. Somehow Mr. Proudfoot wanted to claim acquaintance: to tell him about Weaver: that Weaver and himself were about to call on him that fatal Sunday: if they had called he would not now be here. But the man with his assistants and the warder were resolutely coming up to him as if they were intent on making a swift end of him, the governor, the chaplain and the doctor looking on. Yes, yes, he would die--if they would leave him alone, or do it--handsomely. He killed Weaver--however inadvertently, he killed him, and he would forfeit his life, on his word of honour he would. But not so---- The hangman and his assistant were trying to pinion him; and suddenly he put up a fight for his life. What right had they? All nonsense apart, what right? A glimpse of the jurymen all back in their homes, and at breakfast, flashed through his brain. What right? Where he got the strength from he did not know, but the prison bell was already tolling for the soul departing, and its last stroke had boomed its melancholy message across the yard into the streets, but Mr. Proudfoot was still alive and struggling desperately with the executioner and three warders, who only knew that they had to despatch him: he should have been liquidated ten minutes ago: there was no document to account for his unwarranted existence after 8 a.m. They were shocked: it was improper in the extreme. “Don’t! Oh!” He wanted to tell them--if they would only stop to listen--he wanted to tell them that--yes--he was a soul, a universe with things in it which had nothing to do with that devil in him they were intent on destroying. It was unjust. A whole universe. “Stop! Think: what are you doing?... _No!_” he cried, struggling in their grip and realising that nothing save his poor physical exertion now stood between him and their grim determination to do away with him. “No! You _mustn’t_!” he pleaded, his soul filled with a sickening animal fear. But they dragged him on without respite, the chaplain leading the way, reading words from the Bible. And if--he thought--there was a God in heaven, why did He stand aside? What God was He to stand aside? “No! No!... _Oh!_ ...” But they were dragging him on none the less, dragging him on to his doom. Swiftly he looked at each of them, for a spark of compassion. But they were all men who valued their duty before everything else. He was in the open. And suddenly a wave of awe came over him, standing as he did on the brink of eternity or extinction: so that the hangman at his neck seemed like a friend who was assisting at a parting, and those others, too, seemed as if they’d come to see him off at the railway station as he was about to step into the train on his awful journey; and he clung to them with fraternal, desperate farewell. But they only looked as though they had no time for that, but wanted to get the nasty business, long overdue, over at last. It seemed minutes before he toed the chalk line on the drop--when suddenly he fell, it seemed minutes, he expected it with drawn breath, the pulling up--when _snap!_ it came!

And all was darkness.

* * * * *

The great harbour was awakening in the cold fog. From the terminus a tramcar set off half empty. The conductor strode inside and began collecting the fare. Then newspapers appeared on the street corners, and posters announced in red and black letters:

“SPECIAL EDITION.
“PROUDFOOT EXECUTED.”

They were eagerly snapped up by busy hurrying people, who stopped and read:

“Proudfoot had a quiet night and is believed to have been greatly
relieved at the end by confessing his crime to the chaplain. The
condemned man breakfasted lightly and walked with a firm step to
the scaffold. From the moment of prisoner leaving his cell to the
execution of the sentence there barely elapsed twenty-five
seconds.”

IN THE WOOD

Lieutenant Barahmeiev, late of the Hussars, was making amorous advances to his landlord’s wife, a Jewish lady of about thirty. “Your lips are saying No! No! No! whereas your eyes are saying Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Vera Solomonovna looked at him with her golden eyes and shook her handsome head and said to him,

“Boris Nikolàech, you’re thirty-eight, and you have no more sense than a boy of twelve.”

Lieutenant Barahmeiev looked more self-confident than ever. It was a fixed idea with him that no woman could refuse his amorous advances, and that no landlord really meant him, seriously, to pay his rent. To whatever women said in proof of their refusal, to whatever landlords said in confirmation of their claims, Lieutenant Barahmeiev had a simple answer. He called it “bluff.” Some English words like “bluff” and “gentleman” have passed into the Russian tongue in the original. He wasn’t born yesterday, he said.

And fully confident of the result, the Russian officer continued, “Why this pretence, this hypocritical reluctance? Why not be frank about it? To-night,” he whispered. “In my room....”

“Go to the devil!” she said, but her eyes seemed to say, “Go on talking.”

“You say ‘Go to the devil!’ But what do you mean? I know what you mean. Wasn’t born yesterday. Why not be honest about it?”

Odessa had been changing hands from Bolshevik to anti-Bolshevik in turn; but the habit of love-making persists through such irrelevancies as wars and revolutions. Life in the flat of Finkelstein, where Lieutenant Barahmeiev occupied a bedroom, went on essentially as it had gone on before the war. I liked my hosts. She, a woman of considerable beauty, greedy for admiration. He, a successful broker, tall, handsome, prepossessing, inordinately proud of being a Jew and always selling foreign currencies to his guests at table. I liked the free and easy manner in the household, the total absence of suspicion on the part of Finkelstein as regards his handsome wife. No doubt he also had no small opinion of himself, and thought that as compared with the Lieutenant he was the better specimen of male all round. And I think that perhaps he was.

At lunch he was saying to Lieutenant Barahmeiev, “Yes, Boris Nikolàech, you Christians like to run us down. You say that we are swindlers, and ‘Never trust a Jew.’ But the fact is that we Jews can trust each other, but I am dashed if we are often given an opportunity to trust a Christian. Take yourself. You call yourself a ‘paying guest.’ But what right have you to the adjective? If it comes to that, what right have you to the noun? Have I asked you to come and stay with us, and overlooking that point, is it a usual thing for guests to stay indefinitely? But your conscience doesn’t seem to trouble you a bit. You eat and sleep, and there! you even seem to have designs on my wife. Ah, you’re a funny fellow, Boris Nikolàech, but, at any rate, it’s some good to us that you are an officer; it will keep them from commandeering our flat while you are here. But what was I saying? Ah, yes, does any one want to buy Romanov roubles? Or I can sell you francs.”

But the Lieutenant went on talking to the hostess. “What I can’t get over is this utter want of frankness in you, Vera Solomonovna. Your soul, your eyes cry out, ‘Take me! I am yours!’ whereas your lying lips pretend to say, ‘Go to the devil.’ Bluff! All bluff, all bluff!”

She turned to her husband and looking at her guest with compassion, said:

“What _can_ I do with him, Lyova? He doesn’t understand. He _can’t_. He really thinks he’s irresistible to women. I’ve never seen anything so brazen in my life. To be quite frank, Boris Nikolàech, you’re not the least bit attractive. I wonder who put that idea into your head?”

“Vera Solomonovna,” he implored her, “be frank for once. You know you are in love with me; why all this hypocritical nonsense about my being ‘not the least bit attractive’? Why all this bluff? I wasn’t born yesterday!”

“In matters of love you’re a school boy.”

“Yes, when I was a school boy I had the innocence to take a woman’s No for No. But now, I need hardly say, I believe it no longer.”

“You wise old man then,” she said ironically, rising.

We followed her into the drawing-room. The window panes were blurred with rain. The sea, the sky, was one grey mass, doleful and monotonous. Below, in the street, one could see the shining hoods of passing cabs; the muffled sound of hoofs reached our windows. In the indoor twilight of the flat one felt at rest, one’s limbs were seized with languor. Finkelstein and his stock-exchange associates retired to his study to play cards.

“The rain reminds me, Vera Solomonovna,” said the Lieutenant, “of an incident in my youth. The woman--oh, she had the self-same psychology, if I may say so, as yourself, and in the end, and in the end ... complete capitulation.”

“I am tired of you,” said she, looking languorous rather than tired.

“Vera Solomonovna,” he said, bending over her; then in a whisper: “Don’t forget to-night ... my room.”

She shook her head.

“How blatantly deceitful women really are,” he said. “You shake your head. Why? Why, when I know----”

She flushed. “This is really getting idiotic!”

“Ha! ha! ha! That is exactly what Zina used to say: ‘idiotic.’ I was going to tell you about Zina when you interrupted me. This was a long time ago--let me see--yes, twenty-one years ago, to be exact. I was seventeen then. I was a cadet at the X---- Military School and I was spending the summer vacation with my aunt at S----, a sea side resort some twenty miles from Petersburg. It was an evening in early June, and we were sitting on the open balcony of the pavilion at the local tennis club. We were discussing something--literature I think, and then, quite relevantly, we switched off on to love. There was this Zina I am telling you about, a beautifully developed girl of twenty-five, who was quite vehement in her denunciation of everything relating to the attraction between the sexes, and as she spoke it was urged upon her that for a person with her views the convent was the only proper place. It was a lovely night, but we sat there and exchanged inanities. Gradually some of us dispersed.

“I was standing by a street stall, buying cigarettes, when I noticed Zina coming up. She bought herself some chocolate. We sauntered away from the stall together.”

“Where are you going?” I asked her.

“Nowhere in particular.”

We went along the big road leading to the sea. Our shoulders touched occasionally as we stumbled over the uneven ground.

“They’re so absurd with their revolting sentimentality,” I said.

“Why talk about them? Look at the clouds,” she said. “How they chase each other. We couldn’t keep pace with them if we ran. And the moon! Gone--and out again!”

We made our way together along a narrow lane. The wooden _datchas_ had been left behind.

“Is this ‘The Alley of Kisses’?”

“No, this is ‘The Alley of Sighs.’”

We went on.

“The moon again!”

“Yes.”

“This is ‘The Alley of Kisses,’” she said, as we turned to our left. Beyond I could hear the sound of the sea.

“Let us sit down here.”

It was an old bench considerably disfigured by a penknife; it bore initials, monograms and names of lovers probably who had sat there in former times.

“So this is ‘The Alley of Kisses,’” I repeated. One seizes with gratitude on such openings.

“Yes.” She looked at me strangely. “And the fools at the tennis club talking rubbish!”

“Yes.”

“The sea and the air! and--as I was saying--this ‘Alley of Kisses.’ Can you feel it?”

I moved closer to her. “May I kiss you?” I said.

“Why do you ask?” she whispered.

“What?” said I. (I am slightly deaf, as you know.)

She waited, and I, being timid, added, “After all, we are ‘allies’ in a sort of way....”

She repeated softly: “Why do you ask?”

She had soft, warm lips; I held my breath back; it was long before I released it; and I wasn’t thinking of the night. “My hand----”

Vera Solomonovna became fidgety with excitement. “Lyova! Lyova!” she cried out; and when Finkelstein appeared, she said, “Come here, all of you. Boris Nikolàech is telling of a romantic episode from his life. It’s most attractive, I assure you, most _piquant_.”

Finkelstein and his stock-exchange associates, abandoning their game of cards, sauntered into the drawing-room, and, still smoking, sank into chairs and stretched out their legs, ready to listen.

“Well, go on,” said Vera Solomonovna.

“My hand, I think I said, was round her waist----”

“Whose waist?” said Finkelstein.

“Zina’s,” explained his wife.

“Who’s Zina, anyhow?”

“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. Go on, Boris Nikolàech.”

“My hand was round her waist. She pressed it to her bosom. I looked round. There was not a soul around, not a sound abroad but for the waves that broke on the sea shore. Dark clouds ran swiftly across the sky.

“Let us go there,” she said, pointing to the wood. We made our way across the shrubbery. I held her in my arms; she began to breathe in a queer, panting way.

“What is it?” I asked ignorantly.

“It’s ... good,” she whispered.

The moon showed between the tall trees; in a few yards’ distance the sea roared before us. Then a big, heavy drop of rain fell on my face--it was warm; and then another.

I sat on the moss, dazed, completely overtaken by the wonder of it all. Suddenly, I heard the rustle of her movements; she had disappeared behind a bush.

“What are you doing?”

There was no answer. I was rather shy about it all, for I was only seventeen. “Don’t!”

She stood behind a shrub and I could hear the rustle of the twigs, the rustle of silk linen, the hollow sound of press-studs. “Don’t,” I said.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“But why? Why?” I said confusedly. “I don’t want to.”

Unveiled, she stood behind me. The big pale moon looked down upon her, but she didn’t mind it. The dark blue wood leered from behind at her; and the roaring sea rushed to her--and receded, rushed and receded. Drop after drop, at long interval, the soft warm rain fell from the dark gathering clouds. “I want, I want you to remember me,” she said softly, “_always_, and now you can’t forget ... that the first woman you have ever seen like that ... was _me_.” Then she crouched to the ground. She began to sob and laugh at the same time. “What am I doing? Oh, I’m mad, mad.... I couldn’t help it. I’ve been reading--all day long I’ve been reading ... such a wicked book. It was awful, unbearable. These silly people on the veranda talked such nonsense, but it wouldn’t have really mattered what they’d said; I would’ve disagreed with them all the same. I couldn’t bear it any longer. And then I felt I wanted--I wanted to do as she, the woman in the book, had done to him. Besides,” she added, “you really are rather attractive, aren’t you? Oh, do you think it’s going to rain properly? It didn’t in the book.”

The Lieutenant ceased.

“Well?” we said. “Go on.”

“That’s all,” said the Lieutenant.

“But what happened afterwards?” asked Vera Solomonovna.

“Nothing happened.”

“But _how_?” she said in a tone as though she had been wronged.

“Well, that’s all there is to tell.”

“But--it’s no proper story even.”

“I can’t help that,” he answered almost angrily. “This is what happened, and this is where it ended. I can’t falsify the facts to suit your taste. We don’t, my dear Vera Solomonovna, live our lives to provide plots for stories.”

“Well, I _am_ disappointed in you, Boris Nikolàech. Really! To begin so well, so fascinatingly, and then, suddenly, to break off ... so shamelessly! Well, really, you’re just like a boy of twelve. You have no sense of proportion, Boris Nikolàech. None whatever! The whole thing, as it stands, is silly....”

“You are a hopeless washout!” Finkelstein was teasing him. “Miss your opportunity like that! My goodness! And call yourself a Don Juan at that!”

“If that’s the end of it,” said Vera Solomonovna, “there was no need to tell the story. You had no business to begin, Boris Nikolàech. It’s simply disappointing.”

“Well,” said Lieutenant Barahmeiev, who seemed hurt, “if it comes to disappointment, I think I have been disappointed more than anyone.”

“The more fool you,” said Finkelstein.

“Nothing to do with me. Didn’t I tell you it was raining?”

“Raining?”

“Pouring! It came on suddenly, burst upon us through the sky. A flood. The revenge of heaven on us.”

“But what’s the point of your story, anyhow?” asked Finkelstein.

“The point?”

“Yes, the moral? Why have you been telling it?”

“Oh, well, I told it to Vera Solomonovna by way of illustrating the psychology of women, because, like Zina, she affects derision of human passion, calls my amorous advances ‘idiotic’; but just you wait and before the day is up---- There you are!”

Vera Solomonovna rose and left the room in protest.

“There,” said Finkelstein, “you’ve disgusted Vera.”

“Disgusted her! Ha! ha! Don’t you believe it. Bluff! my dear fellow. All bluff. You don’t know women.”

“You’re a funny fellow, Boris Nikolàech. One can’t say you’re altogether stupid, but there are things you simply cannot understand. Impossible to penetrate yon marble brow of yours; it’s just like throwing a rubber ball at a stone wall: jumps back at you every time. And you don’t know women. To take my wife, for instance. She’s had enough of you already; she’s gone back to her bedroom in disgust.”

“To _her_ bedroom?” questioned the Lieutenant in a derisive tone of voice.

“You don’t expect her to go to yours, do you!”

“Why.... Oh, well, really, my dear fellow, I can see that you don’t know women--although you’ve got a wife. Believe me, I know a thing or two about them. Wasn’t born yesterday. Disgusted! Ha, ha, ha! You wait till I finish my cigarette and retire to my bedroom. You may be sure she’s----”

“Boris Nikolàech,” said Finkelstein, looking at him tranquilly through the smoke from his cigar, “you are an optimist.”

And, looking dignified and prepossessing, he sauntered over to his study where his stock-exchange associates were already waiting for him to resume their game of cards.

“Just a moment ...” muttered the Lieutenant, “ ...finish my cigarette....”

TRISTAN UND ISOLDE

He met her at one of those numerous little dancing clubs of Vienna which assemble regularly once a week at a particular café, where the facilities for introduction are only equalled by the ease of admission. When he asked where they could meet again, she told him, smiling sweetly, where to call her up next day, and he noticed that, besides having beautiful grey eyes with lashes like black needles and luxuriant black hair, she had an even, gapless semi-circle of white teeth and, at the corners of her mouth, the foreshadowing of a moustache in after years. “And what name?”

“Ask for Fräulein Isolde.”

“Isolde! How romantic! Will you dance?”

“I do not dance.” She smiled divinely.

“Well, it’s a relief, if anything. I am tired of jazz music, tired of having to prance about every night on my flat feet on the dubious chance of meeting a nice girl.”

“I like,” she said, “to sit at home with a book.”

“I can’t tell you how glad, how--”

“Are you fond of Art?”

“Love it!”

“I will take you to the Art-Historical Museum.”

“Good?”

She closed the eyes with the long lashes and nodded rapidly in response. Her brows twitched. And he loved her.

Next day they met at a café in the Ring. She turned up three-quarters of an hour after the appointed time in a black coat, black hat, and a black frock buttoned to the neck. With dark abundant locks and pale powdered face she sat, mysterious, smoking innumerable cigarettes. And only asked, “What is it like in America?”

“Very nice,” he said.

“Are you studying here?”

He nodded. She smoked on.

A dingy pox-marked poet came in and sat down beside them and opened the portfolio he carried stuffed with his writings. She laid a tender hand on his shoulder, scanning the while the pages of a story. “Yes,” she commended. “You have hit it off all right.”

They motored to the castle of Schönbrunn and sat in a summer-house by the water, romantically, and walked in the park. He took her arm tenderly. She was sad. “Why?” he asked.

“Memories.” They walked on in silence. “We shouldn’t have come here,” he said. She pressed his arm in mute recognition. He helped her into the motor. “You’re so kind and tender to me. I am not used to it,” she said. He kissed her hand in dumb adoration. “I woke up this morning and smiled. I wondered why I was smiling, and then remembered I had met a nice man.”

“When I leave Vienna you must come abroad with me,” he said jestingly.

“It’s not out of the question,” she answered seriously.

He talked glibly about the dearth of intellectual satisfactions. “You’re so different from other girls. Your nature is artistic.”

“I will show you round the gallery,” she said.

When they went--“This is a picture over which I wept,” she told him.

“This is not bad,” he said, stopping at a Rembrandt.

“Yes, he has hit it off.” Her eyes filled.

“What is it?”

“We used to come here, Hans and I.”

“And where is he now?”

“Dead.”

“Long?”

“Nine months. We had been engaged three years. And then, suddenly, he died--for no reason--of a mere cold. So young--twenty-two.”

“But you too are so young, you have your life to live.”

“It’s all in the past.”

“No, no! And you’re so beautiful.”

“I will show you my big picture.”

He waited in the motor while she ran upstairs to the apartment to fetch it.

“Wonderful!” he commented.

“Now I must rush back, father is waiting. And you can have the picture of me till we meet again to-morrow.”

But she stepped inside and they went for another ride with the picture. “Where to?” asked the man.

“Round and round,” she said. She crossed her legs, the skirt slipping up above her knees, and lit a cigarette. And suddenly he leaned over to her and kissed her on the mouth.

“Tut-tut-tut--You mustn’t kiss. Wait till I kiss you.”

“I _have_ waited,” he answered, “and I’m still waiting, and, by God! I can’t wait any longer” (with the taxi-meter piling up, he thought, piling up all the time while we wait, and the chauffeur the only one to gain by it.)

“This is the Prater,” she said.

“Where to?” asked the taxi-man.

“Round and round,” he said dismally.

She burst out laughing. “You said this so funnily!” She gave him a furtive kiss on the lips. “What is your name?”

“I have a silly name. I’m called Ebenezer.”

“It is--rather silly.”

“Well, you needn’t call me by it. You can invent another name for me.”

She considered. “Peter,” she said.

“All right--Peter.”

When she fell ill he sent her flowers, and every day she sent a message--that she was a little better, or a little worse. Then she came again to the café. “Beautiful, beautiful flowers! I was breathless when I saw them. And so much!”

He buried his face in her hands, “Beautiful girl ... beautiful flowers. Wonderful when I think: I’ve been seeking, all these months, all these years I’ve been seeking, and now I have found.”

“I too. For nine months I was alone. Now when I come to the café, the waiter says confidentially: ‘The gentleman is already here.’ One feels one has somebody.”

“While you were ill, when I used to come here by myself, the waitress looked at me with sad eyes, as if she thought you’d left me or we had broken it off. I notice we’ve become privileged guests and are treated accordingly.”

She smiled--so sweetly and intimately, and, watching him, laughed. He looked up from his cup. “I must laugh,” she said, “at the way you scratch the last drop of sugar out of the cup.” He laughed too. She was delightful. “I’ve just come back from Adolf’s bedside,” she remarked.

“And who is Adolf?”

“My fiancé.”

“This is new to me.”

“At least he thinks he is my fiancé.”

“And you don’t think so.”

“No.”

“This is a relief.”

“He is dying now.”

“Oh--is he?” And secretly he thought: This is a relief. “What does he do?”

“He is a doctor--venereal and skin diseases. But he is very tender and aesthetic and plays the piano wonderfully--Schumann and Chopin. He says he will let me live as I like and love whom I like, that he will never touch me, and only wants to be allowed to marry me and to live by my side.”

When they came out of the café, it was a sunny afternoon. “Come, I’ll show you where I live,” he said, and they made their way to Am Hof--the old-fashioned square of Vienna where he had rooms. She took off her hat and used his comb and sat down at his writing-table. “It must be nice to live like that. If I were you I would give myself up to my work, and never tie myself up with any woman.”

“How you understand me! Other women are so conventional and self-seeking. But you--you are so delightfully free and easy, so unusual and romantic!”

She sat in his chair, and suddenly sleep overcame her. “I want to lie down.” She lay down on his bed, and he sat down beside her. “I feel like a faithful old dog sitting at your feet and seeing that you come to no harm.” She gave him her hand, which he pressed to his lips. He looked at her legs in the glossy silk stockings, the seductive shoe. Warm, yielding curves, unexplored mysteries. And he said, “After all this seeking, to feel you have found ... at last. It’s not--no, not your face; it’s....” He was gently pressing her knee; she made an involuntary attempt to disengage it. “ ... your soul,” he said--and she left it. “I’m content: I really need nothing. Not by a word would I suggest or precipitate the moment.... Not till you yourself ... an offering, a priceless gift.” She pressed his hand to her heart. “Not even then. I’m content, I need nothing.” She touched his brow silently with her lips.

“Yes?” he asked, suddenly crushing her in his arms. “Yes?”

She closed her eyes with the lashes like black needles, nodding rapidly several times. “Pull down the blinds.”

“Oh, I am grateful! Tristan and Isolde.... _Nacht der Liebe_....” He was whistling.

“Is the door locked?”

“I’ll lock it for you--do anything for you.” Of sheer relief, he felt like cracking cheap jokes.

“What is the time?”

“It’s four o’clock in the afternoon--the time people here take their 5 o’clock tea.” The yellow blinds drew to and fro in the breeze. Outside in the sunny square the women were selling oranges and flowers. Upstairs somebody began playing the piano. “This is Schumann,” she said. “Adolf plays this.” The blinds still swayed gently, gently, and they could feel the breeze on their burning cheeks. She knitted her brows. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Adolf is waiting for me. I’ve neglected supper for father.”

He turned on the switch. “No, no, I am ashamed of the light.”

It was black night when they went out. Stepping into the taxicab at the door, she gave her address. “You shouldn’t have told him where you live before that old caretaker woman. You never can tell.”

“I take full responsibility for what I do and I am prepared to face the consequences of my acts, and I have nothing to be ashamed of,” she said. He remembered the prudish cowardly attitude of his own forget-me-not eyed sisters, his mother, his maidenly aunts. “You wonderful girl!” he exclaimed. He felt grateful, so that he did not even mind how much he had to pay for the taxi. She scanned his face and his figure, and he instantly looked at his gloves. “They are filthy, I know.”

“Give them to me, I will wash them for you.”

“No, no, why should you?”

“The maid will wash them.”

“Very well, then.”

The taxicab pulled up at her house door. “Just see me upstairs. It’s so dark.” She took hold of his arm and with a sure quick step ran up the stairs, while he fumbled uncertainly with his feet. She gave him a kiss in the dark, which missed the mark, handed him the house door key, begged him for the sake of love not to make a noise--and was gone. He felt his way carefully by the chalk walk, dirtying his coat and hands--and presently lost himself. For an hour he fumbled about in the dark, groping his way down the steps time without end, only to find himself at the end of each attempt in the coal cellar. Now I’ve made a noise, he thought, the caretaker will come out, call the police and have me arrested. I’m a lost man. When, having given up all hope, suddenly he saw a shimmering of light, then a new turning, the real stairs--and he was saved. The Votive Church as he went home seemed made of lace: the tall twin towers, like a prayer, strained heavenward in the blue night. He sat down on a bench and thought of her.

He was more than usually courteous to the old caretaker woman. “A pretty girl, I call her,” she said, opening the heavy outer door for him, while he paid the customary “lockout money.” “Is she your bride?”

He nodded.

“Ah, well, young men have luck. But I’m not one to let the cat out of the bag.”

He fumbled in his pockets.

“Thank you.--I am known to be discreet. Baron Waldmeyer who lived here nine months ago also used to bring his bride up to his rooms, regularly three times a week you might say. A pretty girl she was, too, Lina Holz--you know the chemist’s daughter across the way. The white house opposite. That’s right. Never a word to anybody. God beware! They were very satisfied with me. ‘Frau Krampf,’ he used to say to me, ‘I can rely on you.’”

Next day they were hurrying in the train into the country. “I too am glad we’re friends,” she said. “My family is nothing to me. Mother died when I was fourteen. She was so small I used to take her on my lap. My sister married rich, but she can’t do anything decently. She is such a snob--hides the fact that we are Jews. She will give father a new suit--or rather says she will--and all so haughtily, you know, so condescendingly, will talk so much about it and in the long run won’t buy him anything and will even borrow money from him in the end. She gives me things occasionally, or rather says she will and doesn’t. But that which is inside one she doesn’t know.”

“Quite so.”

Yet he had discovered that Isolde, despite her intellectual pretensions, was as fond of cabarets and dancing halls as any other child of pleasure-loving Vienna. And she was not content with going to one cabaret during a night, but from the one immediately wanted to go on to another, and from that to a third--in all respects similar to the first.

“I’m different,” she said. “Already as a child we had no points of contact. My sister would go out on the Korso to be stared at by men, while I sought my friends among writers and artists, or went off by myself to the Opera and tried to find my real ‘I’ in the _Walküre_, the _Ring_, the _Meistersinger_, in _Tristan und Isolde_.”

“Very becoming for one named Isolde! If one didn’t know you were above such cheap romanticism, one would almost suspect you gave yourself that name.”

She laughed faintly.

“Why--_did_ you?”

She closed her eyes and nodded rapidly.

“How clever of you!” He kissed her hand.

“My real name is Rebecca.”

“Let’s forget that it is. We’ll go to the Opera together--to _Tristan_. A good performance here, isn’t it?”

She closed her eyes and nodded rapidly, significantly. “I’ll bring the complete musical score. I have the entire _partitura_ and we can follow it.”

“By God! we’ll follow it!” said he, though he was quite unable to read music.

At the Opera, all the liveried attendants seemed to know her. “Ah, Fräulein Isolde, it’s good to see you again!”

“It’s the first time that I am here since (her eyes filled)--his death.” And she ushered him upstairs through drafty corridors with the air of a proprietress showing a visitor round the premises. “Here Hans and I used to sit. Or, when we had little money, we stood over there or sat on the steps.”

“A fine Opera House.”

“Yes, this is my temple.”

She carried an enormous book--the complete musical score of the piece, and they sat down and he read the biographical note, while the orchestra enclosure gradually filled and the executants began tuning up their instruments.

“Because I have never known love in real life I want now to realise it in music.” Thus Wagner one day wrote to Liszt. “I have jotted down in my head a _Tristan und Isolde_, the simplest but the most full-blooded of musical conceptions: with the black flag which flies at the end I then want to cover myself and to--die.”

There was a meagre trickling of applause: the conductor threaded his way to his seat, passed his hand over the page under the green-shaded lamp, raised the _bâton_, and began. They sat close together, the Prelude with its high-stepping, long-striding sinuous tentacles groping after new resting-places, far out of reach, yet working out its salvation surely and steadily, swelling and widening, till--the conductor shaking his locks and his fists--the brass blared its compelling response; and, in a tide of regaining tranquillity, the Prelude gradually evened itself out to the level at which it began, and the curtains parted, revealing the ship. She followed the score with a preoccupied air, now and then nodding her head with that significant look of critical recognition; but when he asked for the place they were at she never could find it and began turning the pages backward and forward, six at a time and in vain. And when, in the second act, King Marke’s hunting horns died away and the cast-down torch went out, to a heart-sinking, intolerably dulcet cadence, and the night was all astir, and Tristan staggered to Isolde, and the great theatre plunged into the most passionately voluptuous music that has ever been, then they pressed each other’s fingers more tightly and their nerves throbbed in unison--until King Marke, returning at a moment least desired from the hunt, surprised the twain. In this passionate music, more truly voluptuous than the grosser senses of man can divine, there lies concealed a certain pledge: a foretaste, maybe, of a reality awaiting us, or one we needs must forego, wrenched from a far world by a genius, for us to partake of before we go under.

In the interval he read more of the biography. Wagner, while working on _Siegfried_, wrote to a friend: “My musical sensibility already sways far beyond it--thither where my mood belongs: into the realm of melancholy.” It was his love for Mathilde Wesendonck--a love of denial for both--which determined the work. “That I have written Tristan I thank you out of my deepest soul into all eternity.” Thus he writes to her three years after completion. It has been said that the musical drama is unreal because the love in it is the artificial outcome of the love potion given to Tristan and Isolde during the voyage instead of the death drink they bargained for. But the potion, of course, is a symbol. Love was latent in them, but could not face the light of day: it is the belief in the certainty of their death held for them in the cup which works the love miracle. Only in death can they give each other. But of that “realm of stilled longings” they had been cheated. He was there--_Der öde Tag!_ And now the third and last act--the empty sea, the hollow day, the dreary convalescence, with the black flag already flying over their destinies. They sat and listened to the sundown glow now sensible in the familiar bars of this greatest of love-tragedies--as it had always been.

The measured strains of the _Liebestod_ had grown quicker and more passionate; Isolde, wrenching her hands, was racing along with the orchestra which, at this turn, was taking the melody from her, easily, in rapidly rising voluptuous strains, climbing, slipping, climbing anew, rapidly, rapidly, to a climax, now, now.... The conductor, forgetting his quasi-reticent attitude, rose in his seat and with a sweep of his stick commanding one hundred and twenty-six instruments, drowned her top notes in a mighty volume of rapturous sound. But she did not mind. Nor did any one mind. On that plane of emotion one does not mind: one felt one wanted to go home, cover oneself with the black flag--and die....

They made their way past the drafty swinging doors into the lighted streets and stood a while in the crowded Opernring, Peter taking her arm. He was elated. He tried to whistle bits he remembered, but she stopped him with a frown. In the café she seemed moody and irritable. “_Must_ you always scratch the cup out?”

“I feel I am wasting my life if I don’t.”

“Why don’t you lick it out with your tongue?”

“What is the matter?”

“I must talk to you very seriously.”

“Well?”

“Another day--to-morrow.”

He would have died of anxiety if he had to wait till to-morrow. “To-night or not at all.”

“About our--relation. I want to have it out with you. I don’t want you to be merely playing with me and then, when it suits you, drop me.” They were going down the teeming Kärntnerstrasse and bent their way into the Graben, walking up the famous Korso. “Here is father’s jeweller’s shop.”

“What’s all this nonsense?” he asked peremptorily.

“Father’s been bullying me. No money to give me. Business going to ruin. No one buying jewelry nowadays. ‘_Ein Skandal!_ You’re twenty-two and I, a man of eighty-six, have to go on supporting you!’ and so on, and so forth. My brother-in-law sits and talks to my father and tells him I ought to get married. And father curses me: ‘Again you’ve been out all night. A good bride and no mistake, Adolf sitting and waiting for you here all the evening!’ Of course, he is right in a way. But I never promised definitely to Adolf. I tell him, ‘Adolf, I value your feeling for me, and if no one better crops up I will marry you in the end.’ So he sits in our drawing-room all evening after leaving the venereal disease hospital, waiting for me and playing Chopin.”

Peter thought of what he might say, but couldn’t say much. “Damn him!” he said.

“And I mean--I don’t want to be playing ducks and drakes with Adolf, who is a man of fine feeling--”

“But hasn’t he died? He was going to.”

“He wasn’t a bit. He only put himself to bed so as to get me to come and sit at his bedside and hold his hand. And what I mean is, a man has a love affair, then another, a third, a fourth, and is only looked up to, even by women. But a girl has to think.”

“Is there--is there--well, you know what I mean?”

“No, there isn’t. All the same--”

“But why say it like that?”

“You should have thought of saying it yourself. I waited long enough.”

“But why in the world did you make out you were unconventional--romantic--God knows what--unlike other women? Why did you?”

“I thought you expected it.”

Damned shameless lie, he thought; and said aloud:

“This would not appear to correspond with the facts. Secretly you were out for marriage from the start and only pretended--don’t I see it now!--but all the time you were on the hunt for a husband.”

“You needn’t flatter yourself. I’m good-looking enough to marry any time I want to. And such birds as you I can find on every bush.”

“Thank you.”

They had reached her house. “Well, am I to ring you up to-morrow as usual?” Her voice was not friendly.